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posted by janrinok on Wednesday October 13 2021, @11:43AM   Printer-friendly
from the for-the-gamers? dept.

[2021-10-13 13:26:33 UTC; Updated to removed duplicated 1st sentence.--martyb]

Drop's new mechanical keyboards go up to $500:

High-end mechanical keyboard and PC peripherals brand Drop (formerly Massdrop) today revealed its next lineup of prebuilt mechanical keyboards. The brand added options to three different series, with its most premium one, Paragon, priced at a whopping $500 apiece.

In addition to making its own products, Drop has a shop where keyboard fanatics can get everything from mechanical keyboard switches to unique and artisan keycaps, stabilizers, and even fancy, detachable cables. The keyboards released today are supposed to make it easier for people who don't want to build their own clacker to get an enthusiast-level option without having to deal with group buys, which take many months before you actually get a product in hand.

[...] Drop's Paragon keyboards are currently available for preorder but aren't expected to start shipping until around November 15.


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Rich on Wednesday October 13 2021, @04:47PM

    by Rich (945) on Wednesday October 13 2021, @04:47PM (#1186695) Journal

    IIRC, the original PC-AT keyboard was priced at 1200 DM before VAT in 1986, which is over 1000€ in today's money. As someone mentioned, the direct successors can be had for far less (yet still three figures), but it gives you an idea how much tooling for proper mechanical small scale production can cost.

    A keyboard is the thing that many of us have their hands on the most time of all things. If one works professionally with it, or can afford it, and the haptics give just a little improvement to the pleasure of working with it, it's a sensible investment. Code might (or might not, dependent on the user) flow easier if the tactile feedback is a precise "tick, tick" rather than an okayish "squodge, squodge". I appreciate good haptics and would rather choose a better keyboard (and monitor) than the top end CPU.

    I even once went to great length when getting a family compact car to get a leather steering wheel over the plastic variety. Instead of the housewife edition in which it was a no-option, we had to get the motorsport one. Luckily my mom really liked that suspension, the brakes, and the bucket seats on the test drive, but the root cause for this small insanity really was the haptics of the steering wheel. (well, _I_ appreciated the engine, too)

    If you look at musician forums, there are long threads about the playability of different keybed mechanisms. (E.g. The properly sprung Yamaha DX-7 keybed is considered excellent (it just doesn't output MIDI velocity to 127), while the same size Yamaha CS-1X keybed with its molded-in plastic-springs is regarded as pretty crappy. The current line-up Fatar mechanisms are generally said to be the best, but even there are differences (e.g. Novation controllers having a high scan rate, or the TP/8S being slightly more pleasant because of a longer action radius than the TP/9S). If you at least partially consider coding work as an art form and want to have the best tools to express yourself, you have my understanding, and I certainly won't place you in a category with people buying $500 "direction-optimized" audio cables.

    A long time ago, I came across a short-lived-offer Logitech short-travel keyboard which I considered superb and have since secured a spare one on ebay. If I saw a similar keyboard with even sharper response, and maybe other luxury features (decent backlight), I might shell out what other people spend on whole computers. (Entry level computers, that is...). However it's not a priority for me, because I mostly work from laptops. But if someone came along and made a 16" laptop shell with such a superb keyboard (and matching screen) for a future, M1-performance-level RasPi compute module (or similar), the price would be a secondary consideration.

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